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On Beyond Fear

The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, testified on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill. For hours, in a calm and methodical manner, she flipped each confrontational line of questioning on its head. No, the bill would not loosen security at borders and ports. It would tighten it. The bill would not weaken immigration enforcement, but strengthen it — adding resources and improving the government’s ability to keep unwanted people out and to catch fugitives, identify thieves and terrorists.

Ms. Napolitano’s testimony filled the last of three days of hearings on the immigration bill, a marathon featuring more than two dozen witnesses from all corners of the country — sort of an immigration Woodstock. Within those three days and the bill’s 844 pages lay a dizzying blizzard of details, but after Ms. Napolitano wrapped things up, a clearer picture started to emerge.

A veteran of the immigration battles could have watched her speak and still have been amazed at the vast sums of money and resources that have been sent to militarize America’s southern border, as if the people flowing across it were an existential threat rather than a problem and opportunity to be controlled and redirected. Ms. Napolitano’s testimony evoked a world of drones, radar and motion sensors, Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops, fencing and razor wire stretching for miles and miles. The bill calls for up to $6.5 billion in new spending, with expanded workplace-verification and entry-exit visa systems, and still more boots and fencing.

What was especially striking was how much of this enforcement has already been accomplished, even as the country keeps waiting for the broader, once-in-a-generation immigration overhaul that this bill — and a companion bill being written in the House — is trying to achieve.

The bill was only just filed and may not pass. The opponents of reform are intense in their desire to break it apart or stall it until it dies. Their arguments against the bill itself are unpersuasive — who could oppose making the system fairer and more efficient, clearing backlogs in legal immigration, or creating a more rational and streamlined visa process to supply the economy with the labor it needs, from Silicon Valley to dairy farms to citrus groves?

What they do have is fear and anxiety, intensified by the Boston bombings. One witness on Monday, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and an outsize figure in the nation’s anti-immigration battles, argued at length about how the bill might allow a hypothetical terrorist calling himself “Rumpelstiltskin” to get his papers and travel as freely as the Boston suspects did.

As Senator Charles Schumer of New York correctly noted, the bill’s opposition grows from one root: restrictionist organizations that see no good in immigration short of mass deportation. They have profited immensely from fear, as the bristling southern border attests. But the flip side of fear is hope, exemplified by the host of witnesses on the other side — the growers, business owners, ministers, state officials, human-rights advocates and undocumented people themselves who have the better argument.